Miriam Allred (00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. I hope everyone's having a great week and a great wrap up to the end of 2025. Today in the lab, I am joined by the founder and CEO of enCappture I've got Denise DiSano with me. Denise, it's a pleasure. How are you doing today?
Denise (00:18)
It's a pleasure to see you and be here. Thank you so much for having me. Doing great.
Miriam Allred (00:23)
Awesome. I've been looking forward to our conversation. You've been a busy woman with your business and with your family and with the end of the year. I know how that goes. So I'm glad that I could sneak you in here at the end of 2025. I think a lot of people know you. You've been on the speaker circuit. You're at a lot of conferences, a lot of franchise conferences. You speak often in the industry. And I think more and more people know you and are familiar with enCappture. But let's go ahead and start with your background. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing before home care and then what led you to start and capture and what you're up to today.
Denise (00:57)
Sure. So what were we doing before Home Care? Well, we were focused ⁓ with our mobile app platform for any business. So we built customized apps for associations like Harvard Alumni Association, large construction firms in New York City, art organizations, even foundations like Crohn's Colitis Foundation, where we built a really cool, unique app. It was a bathroom locator, and we called it We Can't Wait.
So we really worked with all kinds of companies. And our goal was always to equip any company with its own mobile app that was built to focus on three key areas. And it was always around simplifying communication, boosting engagement, and providing a place to act as their own hub. Because for everything they needed, they want to make sure all their stakeholders had it in their hands.
⁓ So really no matter what type of business we realized is that they were all drowning in the same thing that disjoints a communication and scattered tools and that low engagement. But it wasn't until we were introduced to home care that we really saw the stakes of that kind of chaos because you know in most industries a breakdown of communication is just kind of like a hassle. But in home care it's dangerous right it's
It means poor quality of care, it means families panicking, it means clients losing trust. So that's when we realized that this industry didn't need another tech tool, but it really needed infrastructure that only an agency's ⁓ own mobile app could provide.
Miriam Allred (02:39)
Super interesting. Out of the gate, that the same root causes apply to most industries is what it sounds like when you say you've been building apps for all these different industries. It kind of boils down to communication and infrastructure and technology tools. Did you spend more time in any one industry prior to home care or have you always been across the board in a lot of different industries simultaneously?
Denise (03:04)
We really were across the board. mean, pretty much for the life of enCappture until a few years ago when we decided to really niche down and we wanted to really go deep in an industry because what happens is that you end up wanting to help every industry and specialize features to that industry. And it's really hard to do that when you're talking to everyone. And then in home care, for the past few years, agencies came to us to reduce caregiver turnover because you know, that was a big buzz. what we were realizing is that they were gaining operational clarity and then their staff was more confident and then they were having the capacity to grow. So whether it was like adding new services or deepening their referral relationships or even turning now their loyal caregivers into strategic partners. So this evolution from any business needing mobile app to the home care industry and then seeing them even evolve working with us has been really exciting.
Miriam Allred (04:10)
Backtrack just a little bit. How did you land on home care? It sounds like you were spread across a lot of different industries. I imagine you had a home care client that kind of led you down this path, but I think you mentioned even before this call personal experiences, looking where the trends are going over the next couple of years. Why home care essentially for enCappture?
Denise (04:34)
So when we decided we were going to niche down, we were actually looking at two industries. One was commercial real estate, because we work with a lot of buildings, especially in New York City, where we're based, and home care. And it actually came down to a personal decision, having a grandmother that was 99 years old, had an in-home caregiver working with her.
And there was always discrepancies on what she told us and the caregiver told us. And living an hour and a half away, we really didn't know or have insight into what was really going on in her home. A funny story, we've been talking to the caregiver and she'd be like, oh, she did great today. She had all her meals because we were worried about her eating. And then I would talk to my grandmother and she's like, I'm hiding my lamb chops in my ice cream container and I'm not going to eat when anyone's here. And we're like, what's really happening?
You know, I really felt that we could go into home care and help the different stakeholders and the different relational pieces within there. And I just felt like we can make a difference as well as then bring a platform that I really feel brings all those people together in one place.
Miriam Allred (05:48)
So talk about the state of technology in home care today. You have been doing this for several years in home care specifically. And so you and I both have seen an evolution of technology over the last couple of years and we're in the hockey stick of AI right now. But what's your take on kind of the good, the bad, the ugly of technology in home care today?
Denise (06:10)
Well, you're absolutely right. Home care has been handed tech that often feels disjointed, right? So the EVV, the payroll, the compliance software, it's been built to manage operations, but in silos. And the most underestimated cost in this industry is the cost of poor tech decisions. And agencies often add new tools to fix issues, which they know actually causes fragmentation.
but they feel like they don't have an alternative. know, when caregivers are expected to juggle multiple logins, apps, and communication channels, the results is confusion, and they feel disconnected and constant handholding from the office, and that basically eats up their team's time, and it leads to burnout on all sides. So I feel like the real cost is lost bandwidth. You the staff gets stuck in the weeds,
they lose the capacity to grow. That's why eliminating that chaos first through consolidation is powerful. And it surprises agencies all the time at how much time they get back and how clarity often gives them that foundation for real growth. I also feel like the good news is the agencies really do want to solve this. The bad news is that most tech stacks just add more systems.
to an already fragmented environment. And what we've seen is that more tech, without essential purpose, and with bolted on features, kind of makes things worse. I don't know if you've seen this, but when an EVV or any other kind of software, they realize they need to add some more features and they start bolted on. I know you use EVV for a visitor.
verification, but now we're going to use it for like a daily survey for caregivers. Now that's like even just like supersizing the confusion on the tools and what they're meant to do, which again then will lead to like poor adoption, right? And that's why when we started working in this industry, we immediately started launching apps as like a caregiver operations hub. And basically it was like a mobile based like command center.
that aggregate all the software together in one place, that allows the caregivers to work with each platform seamlessly. And the funny thing, we were immediately getting questions from the other software companies and they were asking, are we competitors? They quickly realized that we weren't. We're not telling our agents, oh, you have to replace all the software and consolidate everything in one place.
What we do is we're just bringing them together onto one roof because that's what reduces the friction. And then we'll layer everything else a caregiver needs to work with that agency around the software. And then we then anchor it in our framework. And we call our framework the three Cs. And I know we're going to talk a little bit about that communication, connection, and consolidation. Because what we found is if those three things aren't right, no tool will fix turnover or help an agency grow their revenue.
